ENGAGING, LEARNING, TRANSFORMING

Building Inclusive, Secure Societies

Building more inclusive and secure societies acknowledges the appalling dangers and lasting harms to people's lives and livelihoods from everyday conflict and violence, but also from risks associated with the environment, health and the economy.

Inclusive institutions key to long-term resilience

Being and feeling unsafe and insecure is devastating to
individuals, families, communities and societies. Our work contributes to a
greater understanding of how we can build resilience and protect people against threats from
conflict as well as environmental, economic, political and social shocks. Preventing a shock from magnifying in to a crisis also requires inclusive institutions and an understanding of how we can enable citizens to feel that they have a stake in the way their
communities are governed.

Greater peace, freedom and safety for people everywhere

IDS’ work seeks to understand the factors that underlie and
reinforce insecurity – a lack of inclusion and citizenship, unequal power
relations and problematic forms of securitisation. This work explores what
institutions, communities, policy and practice can do to achieve peace, freedom
and safety for everyone, everywhere.

Patricia
Justino, IDS Research Fellow and Leader of the IDS Conflict and Violence
Cluster:

“With almost one
third of the world’s population living in low-income conflict-affected
countries, it is critical that we understand the effects of conflict on
people’s welfare, behaviour and poverty.”

Read more

Security in the Vernacular - special issue of the journal Peacebuilding edited by IDS Research Fellows Jeremy Lind and Robin Luckham, presenting new analysis and case studies, which aim to challenge and refresh the established policy consensus around violence reduction and security

The aim of this project is to evaluate the association between types, locations, timing, and amounts of development aid and the likelihood, escalation, severity, spread, duration, and recurrence of violence, spanning the phases before, during, and after conflict. More details

In a context of unprecedented investment in natural resource developments, this project bridges the social sciences, the humanities and community-based participatory research to ask how different ‘communities’ of actors ‘see’ and experience resource conflicts in Kenya and Madagascar. We use social science alongside a variety of participatory multimedia methods to open up conflict research to more diverse framings and voices, which can offer new insights on the drivers of resource conflict and pathways to peace. More details

The aim of this project is to develop training videos for urban police that can be accessed via mobiles. This kind of platform allows the videos to be centrally updated, accessed (or ‘pushed’) on demand, and also allow for an innovative addition to police performance monitoring. More details

Prof. Patricia Justino is working on the World Development Report 2017 as an advisor to the lead author of the chapter on "Security, Conflict and the Absence of Violence", as well as producing a background paper for the WDR chapter. More details

Analysing how the relationship between populations living in contexts of violence and armed non-state actors controlling or contesting those areas results in forms of local governance and order, and how this affects people's livelihoods. More details

The “Capacity Building for Smart Data and Inclusive Cities” (SDIC) project aims strengthen technical and institutional capacities by working directly with municipal authorities participating in the Smart Cities Mission in four secondary cities in India: Bhopal and Jabalpur (in Madhya Pradesh) and Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi (in Kerala). More details

The aim of this third phase of cooperation between IDS and SDC is to share learning and collaborate on policy engagement in priority areas of decentralised and democratic local governance. More details

Expanding access to work and services, such as public utilities and safe and reliable transportation, are important elements of any approach to strengthen security in poor urban neighbourhoods. More details

This study aims to understand and compare processes and relationships associated with the ‘marketization of nature’ – how nature-based commodities and markets for trading them are brought into being – in the context of mangrove afforestation, reforestation and restoration projects in Kenya and India. More details

Pathways to Inclusive Development through Innovation, Technology and Change is developing a framework to analyse alternative pathways that link different forms of technological innovation, and evaluate resulting structural change and inclusion outcomes in low-income countries. More details

The Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency (PVCA) project is an action research project designed by researchers at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and carried out with a number of institutional partners. More details

In the context of exploring the dynamics and logics of violence and responses to it by the state and the international community, Nigeria and Sierra Leone make interesting case studies. These case studies are part of the Addressing and Mitigating Violence programme, which focuses on 'newer' forms of violence and organised crime as well as the changing dynamics of long-standing situations of violence More details

This Working Paper comprises a literature review that was carried out to inform the formulation of a research project on power, violence, citizenship and agency, which addresses how social actors react to complex, violence-prone contexts. More details

Development researchers, governance specialists, security and international relations analysts are cartographers of the modern world. Their job is to untangle the tangled, yet in doing so they all too often make flat all that is high and rolling. More details

This article argues that the recent Ebola crisis is the result of structural violence, as interlocking institutions have produced interlaced inequalities, unsustainabilities and insecurities. More details

Regional integration and development in East Africa have been portrayed as inextricably linked. Integration involving investment in trade and transport corridors to move goods, services and people between coast and resource-rich hinterlands is seen as part of development and economic growth, even peace-building. More details

This high-level roundtable explored the complex links between poverty, violence, insecurity and the provision of services, drawing on four case studies from within Nairobi, Kathmandu, Mumbai and India as a whole. More details

The green revolution and the global integration of food markets were supposed to relegate scarcity to the annals of history. So why did thousands of people in dozens of countries take to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011? More details

In recent years, violent insurgency has gripped the margins of Kenya, Mali and Nigeria. Militant Islamist groups have attacked civilian populations, state security personnel and political-administrative officials, spreading insecurity across large areas and exploiting the mistrust between societies at the margins and central authorities. More details

Conflict-related sexual violence remains pervasive across the globe, and its widespread use has been reported in Rwanda, Liberia, Northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. More details

In the aftermath of regime ruptures in the Arab world and with the political ascendancy of Islamist groups, there has been a mass exodus of citizens belonging to religious minorities from the region. More details

Rural development thinking can no longer claim that conflict falls outside its mandate, according to this edition of the IDS Bulletin. The nature of warfare in Africa is changing dramatically. War is being used as an instrument of policy, and becoming a way of life in the worst affected areas, with civilians, not combatants, the most vulnerable. More details